Sita Sings The Blues Essay

This aspect of Indian culture was evident in this story through a few examples. First, the wives both stayed home and cleaned the house, Radha looked after her son, and they cooked the food. They were also treated inferior by their husbands. An example of this is when Dukiram comes home demanding and expecting food from his wife. He treated her like he was the boss or as if he was more important than her. Lastly, Chandara willingly accepts her husband's request to confess the crime. This indicates that women back then viewed theirselves as being inferior to men because of the way Indian culture taught them.

Ramayana, translated by William Buck, is an ancient Indian epic telling the story of a prince named Rama who fights against his adversary, Ravana. Although there are many important female characters throughout the book, they are often seen as subordinate to their male counterparts where intelligence and strength are concerned. One character who proves this stereotype wrong is Sita, Rama’s wife, who often shows that she has the capacity of being just as powerful as the men of the story. By being more mindful than most people around her, Sita defies the expectations that many characters have placed on her. Sita lets the reader see another side of women’s power and shows us the strength that women could have. The reason that Sita proves to be powerful is that she seems to have an understanding of the deeper meaning of her life; precisely the quality that men don’t expect her to have.

Sita, Devi’s mother, in fact fitted the ideal description of womanhood. Sita, as her name signified was symbolic of an ideal wife, mother and daughter-in-law. She saw her femininity as an “illusion” and so she “seized it firmly by its roots and pulled it out of her soul till the enticing stems of the seven noted scale came, apart, broken and disharmonious in a cluster of pathetic twangs” (105). By giving up her veena she was giving up Saraswathi, to take on another goddess, the most ferocious of all, Kali. She meticulously planned the lives of her husband, her daughter and herself with clinical efficiency. She led her husband from promotion to promotion as he moved up the corporate ladder. When Devi was born she found a new ‘Veena’ to play on. She planned Devi’s education and sent her to America. She sent her husband, Mahadevan to Africa on a prestigious assignment. However the

Blues is a music genre originating in Africa .This genre emerged with the introduction of African people as slaves to America's south. Slaves were employed in poor conditions in the cotton fields before the Civil War. Making music meant avoiding the pain for them. People think Blues music is slow and smooth because the lyrics of the Blues music always includes depression, loneliness and anger.

The Ramayana is an Ancient Indian epic poem that follows the story of a young prince named Rama who is a mortal incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. The plot follows a narrative that starts from his first time outside the royal palace, through his banishment from the kingdom and his quest to save his beloved wife Sita from Ravana, the evil King of Lanka, all the way to his coronation as King of Ayodhya, the kingdom from which he was originally banished. Throughout the whole narrative, there is one factor that remains constant, the role of women in the culture. The acceptance, or rejection of these cultural values by the women directly corresponds with how their character is perceived by the reader and how their role directly influences the

This paper attempts to examine the fictional projections of Indian girls, to see how they emerge in ideological terms. Their journeys from self-alienation to self-adjustment, their childhood struggles against the hypocrisies and monstrosities of the grown-up world, eventually demolishing the unjust male constructed citadels of power that hinder their progress- are the highlighted issues. The point of comparison between the two novels focused on here is the journey of Rahel in The God of Small Things and Sai in The Inheritance from a lonely childhood to a tragic adulthood passing through a struggle with the complex forces of patriarchal society. Both the novels portray the imaginativeness, inventiveness, independence, rebelliousness, wide-eyed wonder and innocence associated with these young girls.

Bessie Smith, also known as the “Empress of the Blues”, was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee on April 15, 1894. She has six other siblings, a father who was a Baptist minister and died a little while after Smith was born, and a mother who died alongside two of Smith’s brothers. When Smith’s mother died, it left Smith’s aunt to raise Smith’s remaining brothers and her. Around this time when Smith’s aunt began to raise them as her own, Smith began to go on the streets and perform as a singer. She sang along to one of her brother’s strumming of his guitar. Smith singing on the streets lead her to start dancing in the Moses Strokes Minstrel show and then the Rabbit Foot Minstrels show, where Ma Rainey was a current participant of the show as a blues singer. Rainey soon began to mentor

Wealth and property feature heavily in the wife’s portrayal of marriage and along with the issue of her independence is responsible for many of her marital conflicts. The first three husbands "riche and olde" were married each for "hir land and hir tresoor" then discarded as the Wife looks for other prospects. When one of these husbands tries to restrict the Wife’s spending she refuses to let him be both "maister of my body and of my good" so refuses sexual favours in return for her freedom as she will not become a mere possession. She generalizes that women "love no man that taketh or keepth charge" suggesting an element of independence and individualism in 14th century marriage. The wife resents being controlled; she

The blues. We all get it at one point or another, and it can be helpful to know someone who can relate or knows what you’re going through. But some people aren’t natural talkers or can easily share their feelings. So what do they do? Some turn to the movies or television shows, others read books, and then there are people who just have to sing it in a song. So what exactly is the blues? How did it come about? Does it have subgenres like rock and roll? Who are some notable artists and what are some of their notable pieces?

Nina Paley draw from the Ramayana to process her grief over her failed marriage, because there are many similarities between her own story and Ramayana’s story. After watching Ramayana’s story, Nina Paley think that Ramayana’s feeling is similar with her feeling now. They used to have a perfect love. However, their love stories do not have a happy ending. Their loves abandoned them for some meaningless reasons. Both of the heroines still love their lover and want to save their hearts. Fortunately, the two beautiful and faithful heroines finally decide to live a new life and find happiness. The two characters in line with the theme of the movie. The movie tries to persuasive women to be themselves. Woman should not always follow with man, but

Art is a form of expression that lives on for centuries but changes in interpretation over time. What may be relevant in this time period may make no sense to the upcoming generations. Nina Paley’s film "Sita Sings the Blues" brings two cultures, traditions, values and time periods together to convey her message and bring relevance of her art across many cultures and generations. The Ramayana by Valmiki on the other hand is a very traditional epic which depicts the ideal of every relation, one ideal example being the wife of Rama, Sita. Idealistically, a wife in Indian culture is to stick to her husband no matter how harshly she is treated by him, she should be calm in every situation and

The Ramayana is an Indian epic which demonstrates what it means to be the perfect man or woman in Indian culture. Due to the story’s mass popularity, there have been many renditions created about it. One of those versions is Sita Sings the Blues, an animated film version of The Ramayana created by Nina Paley in 2008. Because of the significant time difference between The Ramayana and the modern Sita Sings the Blues, the values presented in the two works differ, as indicated in several ways. One particular event within the two interpretations that displays both similarities and differences is when Sita is captured by Ravana.

When readers all around the world study this piece of literature they will see how it is no different in India than America, people still have problems in their relationships all created by communication issues. Additionally, the Das’ relationship is different because she and her husband had a choice as to whom they wished to marry. Readers learn how she actually chose to get married at a young

Typically, watching one’s significant other throw themselves onto a fire does not constitute a fun and exciting couples bonding experience. However, for Rama and Sita, of The Ramayana, this type of trial allows them to live together after Sita undergoes a traumatic kidnapping. Rama subjects Sita to a trial by fire in front of a large gathering of people in order to prove her purity, not to him, but to the people around them, which carries importance because Rama must acquiesce to tradition, but cannot serve as a judge of Sita’s character. Rama did not arrange for Sita to undergo such a trial because he thought her to be impure or to maintain his own image. Furthermore, this suggests that this society expects women to take part in the punishment for impurity, even if they were the victim.

She is consistently described as a crying victim rather than a strong understanding wife who was endowed to her husband’s role in the kingdom. Sita exclaims that, “I must have done a terrible sin in a previous life in order to deserve such suffering” (Paley 1:01:23). Even though Paley retells her version with more of a feminist Sita, this may not be a very appropriate. By removing the aspect of female dharma, she is also removing the traditional Indian culture from the original myth.